Freedom, Interference and Domination

Interference and domination make persons less free. This paper discusses how they do so. It considers and rejects two influential recent accounts of freedom, one that holds that freedom is best understood in terms of non-interference and one that holds that freedom is best understood in terms of non-domination. Against these accounts, the paper argues that both interference and domination play an important role in reducing freedom and that neither concept can be reduced to the other. To bolster this argument, the paper presents and defends an account of freedom that relates both concepts back to a common source. This account shows that while interference and domination have independent significance for judgments of freedom both reduce freedom by obstructing the ability of persons to plan their lives.     

Freedom,immigration, and adequate options

According to the freedom argument for open borders, immigration restrictions are generally unjust because these restrictions infringe on important freedoms, such as freedom of association and the economic liberties. Some authors have objected to the freedom argument by claiming that potential immigrants only have rights to sufficient options to live decent or autonomous lives and, consequently, states can permissibly prevent people from immigrating when potential immigrants have adequate options. This paper shows that this objection to the freedom argument for open borders is unsound and that restrictions on international freedom of movement can be morally impermissible even when potential immigrants have adequate options.     

Republican Freedom,Popular Control,and Collective Action

Republicans hold that people are dominated merely in virtue of others' having unconstrained abilities to frustrate their choices. They argue further that public officials may dominate citizens unless subject to popular control. Critics identify a dilemma. To maintain the possibility of popular control, republicans must attribute to the people an ability to control public officials merely in virtue of the possibility that they might coordinate their actions. But if the possibility of coordination suffices for attributing abilities to groups, then, even in the best case, countless groups will be dominating because it will be possible for their members to coordinate their actions with the aim of frustrating others' choices. We argue the dilemma is apparent only. To make our argument, we present a novel interpretation of the republican concept of domination with the help of a game‐theoretic model that clarifies the significance of collective action problems for republican theory.     

Tocqueville, Jansenism, and the Psychology of Freedom

In American political discourse, freedom is often spoken of in terms of its inherent rationality or divine origins and is conceptualized as nothing more than a set of concrete institutions coupled with individual rights. By way of Tocqueville's Democracy in America, I will attempt to broaden our political vocabulary by constructing a psychology of freedom. According to Tocqueville, the American consciousness is largely a product of two conflicting tendencies: Cartesian rationality and Pascalian existential angst. Out of the tensions created by the interplay of these two elements Tocqueville demonstrates that the motivations to sustain freedom, as well as the institutions and practices crucial for the maintenance of it, result from a complex psychological mixture of self-interest, vanity, and a desire for solitude.     

Reflections on Scientific Inquiry,Academic Freedom,and Enlightenment

This paper explores the connections between scientific inquiry, scholarly reflexivity, and enlightenment. I argue that the free intellectual inquiry essential to the practice of science is a fundamental constituent and enactment of human dignity, freedom, and democracy. The expansion and diffusion of these values are both unavoidable in the modern age and immensely valuable, even if there are of course many obstacles to their expansion and no guarantees of their ultimate realization. This process of scientific inquiry also contains the seeds of a discourse ethic with broader ramifications for public enlightenment and perhaps even democratization. I develop these themes through a dialogue with some of the writings of Professor Yu Keping on the topics of Chinese political science and “incremental democracy.”     

自由及其限度——关于自由的两种面相

自由是西方政治哲学中的一个核心概念,从古希腊、古罗马肇始以来便对西方发展产生了深远的影响,同时也引起了无数的争论.这些争论源于自由本身所固有的限度,由于这些限度自由先天地具有两种面相.要准确理解自由,我们就必须把握好绝对自由与相对自由、消极自由与积极自由、"单一"自由与"多元"自由这些概念及其关系.基于这些认识,才能使得对自由的追求在新的时期更加健康、持久地发展.     

Republicanism, Freedom from Domination, and the Cambridge Contextual Historians

Philip Pettit, in Republicanism: a Theory of Freedom and Government (1997), draws on the historiography of classical republicanism developed by the Cambridge Contextual Historians, John Pocock and Quentin Skinner, to set up a programme for the recovery of the Roman Republican notion of freedom, as freedom from domination. But it is my purpose to show that classical republicanism, as a theory of institutional complexity and balanced government, could not, and did not, lay exclusive claim to freedom from domination as a defining value. Positive freedom was a concept ubiquitous in Roman Law and promulgated in Natural Law as a universal human right. And it was just the ubiquitousness of this right to freedom, honoured more often in the breach than the observance, which prompted the scorn of early modern proto-feminists like Mary Astell and her contemporary, Judith Drake. The division of society into public and private spheres, which liberalism entrenched, precisely allowed democrats in the public sphere full rein as tyrants in the domestic sphere of the family, as these women were perspicacious enough to observe. When republicanism is defined in exclusively normative terms the rich institutional contextualism drops away, leaving no room for the issues it was designed to address: the problematic relation between values and institutions that lies at the heart of individual freedoms.     

Freedom and Opportunity

The article discusses recent attempts in rational choice theory to take account of the opportunity aspect of freedom, i.e., the value of alternatives, in measuring freedom. It is argued that each of these approaches (in terms of fixed preferences, of possible future preferences and of the preferences of reasonable persons) fails to solve important conceptual problems. Furthermore, we argue that differences between measures of opportunity freedom reflect different moral standards for the quality of alternatives, not different conceptions of freedom as such. Hence, we propose to separate discussions about the meaning of the concept of freedom from the issue of determining the value of opportunity sets.     

自由幻象

在货币哲学视域中,货币是独立于现实世界的一种魔力,可左右人的生存与自由。自由是人的内在本质与发展诉求,追求自由是人生命本质的永恒奋斗目标。自由与必然是对立与统一的,并且自由是对必然的超越。在货币经济时代,人类追求的永恒的价值目标变成了对货币的追逐,人的尺度的评价标准被货币尺度所取代,自由异化了。     

自由与儒学

王海明认为,自由是能够按照自己的意志——而不是自己的想望——进行的行为。在一些情况下,由于缺失利用自由能力的条件,自由行为仍然不能实现。接下来,王海明引进了对自由的传统的经典理解,即"积极自由"和"消极自由"。通过王海明对自由概念的分析,我们可以以一种新的理解方式去诠释自由:即将自由分解为内在自由和外在自由。从自由的角度去解读儒家的本体——天理和良知,寻求在自由精神支配下的民主和科学在现代新儒学中的定位。